


delicate (a new hope)

by the_garbage_will_do



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bounty Hunter Armitage Hux, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Polyamory, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24077245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: Rey resurrected Ben years ago. He's married her and made a home with her, believing all the while that Hux died in the war.“You’re not supposed to be alive."“It seems to be mutual. How disappointing."
Relationships: Armitage Hux & Rey, Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Various Relationships
Comments: 12
Kudos: 52
Collections: Reylux Spring Fling





	delicate (a new hope)

**Author's Note:**

> This story features several characters in a polyamorous relationship. Reylo is happily married, while Kylux gets together in this story. For a more complete description of the relationship dynamic, see the end notes.

Ben’s eyes are closed. Standing on a bridge, he’s somewhere deep in the Force, soul aware at once of every droplet in the air. It’s raining again, but not with the fury of the morning’s tempest. There’s only a calm drizzle so fine it seems like mist, soft and cool on the back of his tongue every time he inhales.

Ben feels him before he consciously hears the creak of the wooden bridge. If his eyes were open he’d see one more local, with dark brown hair and dull gray clothes. Just one more local casting a glance towards him— a clear outsider, between the black hair and the robe of white and the excessively large frame— before deciding to mind their own business and passing him by.

The bridge doesn’t let out a second creak. The “local” comes to a halt, and Ben can barely breathe.

“You’re not supposed to be alive.”

With those words, Ben turns to see Armitage Hux. His hair’s unstyled, dyed and disheveled in the wind, and it flutters long over those storm-swept eyes, gray as the clouds still lingering from morning. His mind feels looser; Ben had barely recognized it at first. It billows, the way one might grasp a first full breath after cutting a rope from the neck. His coat billows too in the wind, worn and grey and cut too large in the local style. Ben watches the ripples for a moment, and wonders if he can identify Hux’s guns just from their outline.

“It seems to be mutual. How disappointing.”

“Pryde—”

“Was armed with an old Imperial blaster,” finishes Hux. “It’s hardly difficult to hack one and set it to ‘stun.’”

“I married Rey.”

Hux freezes. “I assume she’s to blame for your...reappearance?”

Ben nods. “She wanted some place with rain. Arkanis was the first planet I thought of.”

Their eyes meet for one odd moment, until Hux shrugs. “...I won’t infringe on your domain.”

As he strides away, Ben revives his senses and calls, “Arkanis is your home as much as it’s ours.”

Glancing back, Hux’s face cracks into the same bladed smirk he used to wield so easily, now strangely weary and out-of-place. “That’s the nicest lie I’ve heard in years.”

.

Two nights later, Ben stares. For once he has an excuse: Hux stands at the center of his garage, converted to an apparent blast zone. Three alarm systems lie dismantled, reduced to their component wires, sensors strewn across the floor. Ben had rigged up a blaster to shoot any intruder in the head, yet Hux’s skull seems perfectly intact. He stands and turns over the blaster in his hands, examining it like a mere curiosity.

“We have a front door.”

“Your security needs upgrading.”

He throws out the words casually, eyes fixed down on metal. Ben’s gaze fixes too long on Hux’s hands— pale, elegant fingers left bare.

“We still knew you were here.” When Hux raises his eyes with the lift of an eyebrow, Ben amends his statement. “ _I_ still knew you were here.”

With a short nod, he returns to his inspection. “I’ve exposed several gaping vulnerabilities in your defenses.”

“Just a favor?”

“A gesture of goodwill.”

“Do you know how many credits—” Ben gestures vaguely at all the equipment lying dissected— “that stuff cost the New Republic?”

“About seventeen thousand,” Hux replies promptly. As an afterthought he adds, “I would’ve negotiated down to twelve-point-five.”

“And why would you ever show me goodwill?”

“You haven’t turned me in.” Hux lays the blaster aside, placing it on a table; they both know it would never threaten Ben.

“Why would I? You were on the right side of the war, when it ended.”

“You believe in my newfound principles?” He graces the words with a slight smirk.

“No,” Ben nearly says. No, he doesn’t believe Hux turned to the Resistance out of deep philosophical conviction. No, he doesn’t trust a Hux left unsupervised, unleashed on the galaxy.

Ben asks himself why he didn’t turn Hux in. He receives no answer.

“I believe in second chances,” he answers.

Hux lifts an eyebrow again in his peculiar, maddening fashion.

“Why did you turn?” Ben asks.

“Pryde’s cologne gave me headaches,” he quips.

“Resulting in temporary insanity?”

“Exactly.”

Ben flashes him a grin. Hux blinks, caught off guard— Kylo Ren had never been one to grin. Some days the motion still feels unnatural on Ben’s face.

A grin splits Hux’s face one second later, and Ben’s pulse speeds to double-time.

“I’ll leave you alone now,” Hux says a moment later. “Or not; I assume she’s excellent company.”

He aims for sharpness and falls short, leaving an out-of-place longing.

“You don’t have to leave.”

“What,” he says, “Rey’d like to have the mastermind of the Hosnian genocide stay for lunch?”

The sarcasm lands this time.

Before Ben can devise an answer, Hux rolls his eyes and exits, pushing past him through the smoking hole he left in the side of the garage. Their bare hands brush, and then he leaves Ben alone at the center of the wreckage.

.

“You’re supposed to _knock_ on the front door.”

The door— durasteel, but carved with intricate flowers to feel less like a slice of war— is sealed shut, its locking console wholly intact. Yet Hux stands inside in front of the door, dressed in grey and shades of blue, a trespasser loitering in the entry hallway. His fingers play among the fresh flowers gathered in a vase. 

“Rey picked those,” Ben adds, low in his voice.

He still doesn’t answer, drawing his fingers slowly up a blood-red petal, stirring up an old memory of Ben’s, or more likely a delirious dream. The night after Starkiller, Hux drawing his finger ever so delicate across the red of Ben’s scar.

“She’s in the city, at the food festival. But I suppose you already know that.”

Hux acknowledges it with a tip of the head.

“It’s been a year,” Ben says, unable to halt his rambling. “I asked, I looked for...for unexplained explosions.”

“It works to everyone’s advantage,” Hux finally observes, “to forget me entirely. General Hux and Kylo Ren can both stay on Exegol, dead and unmourned.”

He looks to Ben, irony sparkling in his eyes.

“How are you?”

It’s a social nicety. Meaningless, easily deflected, and yet Hux gapes like a blow struck home.

At last he replies, “I need information from the Resistance. The whereabouts of our old Lieutenant Elida.”

“Why?” Ben frowns. “Planning to create the Second Order?”

“With Elida?” He scoffs aloud. “Please, I have taste.”

“So?”

Hux purses his lips, shoulders tight with unconscious tension. “There’s a considerable bounty on her head.”

Ben freezes to absorb this information before letting out a guffaw.

“What?” demands Hux.

“So you wear a mask now?”

“It’s strategic,” he replies. “Half-expected of a bounty hunter and mandatory for someone with my...track record, to enter Resistance or Order strongholds.”

“And your hair’s grown to non-regulation length.” With a slow-growing smile, Ben gestures at his hair— once again loose, with one sumptuous curl draped over his eyes. 

“The hair is a matter of discretion,” he says, increasingly wary. “Even if someone catches me without the mask, the color and length might prevent identification.”

“And—" Ben quotes Hux’s protests of yesteryear, slipping into a parody of his accent— “you must have an ‘utterly impractical cloak to help you pretend you’re not a child’?”

“Of course not! The cloak…”

“So there is a cloak!”

“ _The cloak_ ,” he says more emphatically, “is treated to deflect blaster fire. It’s equipped with multiple secret compartments and extensively fireproofed…”

“Is it long, dramatic and black?”

“...Perhaps.”

Ben smirks in triumph.

“Elida,” Hux repeats with an eyeroll, suppressing his own smile. “I tracked her to Lothal, but I got sidetracked before grabbing her.”

He snorts. “Sidetracked by what, an unclaimed turbolaser?”

“By an ambush,” he replies, his tone equally light. “The downside of being a traitor is both sides want me dead.”

For one precarious moment, Ben feels at risk of saying something sentimental.

“Elida,” he repeats instead.

“The Resistance’s sources may be better than my own,” Hux admits.

“Is this just a matter of business?”

“What are you implying?”

Ben chooses his words cautiously. “Just that Elida was the one who made that remark on the _Finalizer.”_

“I’m surprised you paid that much attention to an organizational matter.”

“I tried, when you were concerned.”

Hux raises an eyebrow. “Then you would know there were seven officers who called me a bastard at some point. On the _Finalizer,_ that is. Pryde alone muttered it ten times on the _Steadfast.”_

“Seven?”

“Elida’s the only one still breathing,” Hux says.

A toothy smile whips across his face, broad and a little mad. A smile General Hux would have never given him.

“So it’s not _just_ business,” Ben finishes, smiling, feeling slightly out of his own mind. “I’ll go call headquarters.”

.

When Ben next sees Hux, he’s traded the dark brown hair for a lighter copper. His locks dangle to his shoulders. Under his facial hair— a mustache and scruffy beard that would have broken at least five Order rules on personal grooming— gaunt cheekbones protrude. His skin is pale from extended space travel. He stands once again in the atrium, a room decorated richly with mahogany and golden lights in classic Arkanis style, with paintings of Ben’s choosing and flowers of Rey’s. He inspects the room with wanting eyes.

“You’re still alive,” breathes Hux, once Ben approaches.

“The assassin didn’t make it past the alarms.”

“You’re welcome.”

Allowing himself the start of a smile, Ben nods and waits a moment. “Is that all?”

Too smoothly Hux replies, “What intelligence have you got on old Moff Keboa?”

“Still bounty hunting?”

“It’s that or endlessly questioning why I’m still burdening the galaxy with my presence.”

He quirks his lips in a skewed smile, a warning against taking him seriously. Ben’s eyes snag on his mouth.

“You—”

A halting bleat cuts Ben off, echoing from an inner room.

“Can I—”

Hux only nods, too stunned to speak.

Ben returns with a baby— a quiet baby, now that she’s folded in his arms. There’s silence except for her occasional abrupt squeak. Hux can only stare.

“You don’t have a nursing droid,” he finally remarks.

Ben shrugs. “Hated them as a kid.”

“So did I.”

Ben’s stare flits up to meet Hux’s, and they scoff in unison.

“Would you like to hold her?”

Hux raises an eyebrow, daring him to think that concept through.

“You can. I won’t mind.”

“I don’t know how,” he admits.

“Here.” Ben steps forward to pass her into Hux’s arms. “Just make sure you support the head—”

“Because human neck muscles take months to fully develop,” he murmurs, undoubtedly reciting from an anatomy textbook. The words are steady. Still Ben feels Hux tremble as he takes her, as their arms press together for one heartbeat, then another, and Ben can’t quite pull away—

“Don’t,” Hux breathes. “If I drop Rey Skywalker’s child, I’ll never escape the executioners.”

Their arms intertwined around his daughter, Ben steals a glance at Hux’s face, storm-grey eyes locked on the little girl who blinks owlishly back up at him. All their years in the Order, they had little more than stolen glances. Nothing beyond the rare brush of gloves.

Ben lets his forehead fall against Hux’s. He can hear Hux’s heartbeat, ringing through the Force, the same rhythm as his own.

Hux draws away.

“I’ve learned,” he says, only a little ragged, and Ben lets him go.

“Do you like bounty hunting?” he asks, scrounging for something, anything to say.

“What I like is rather irrelevant.”

“There are other options,” Ben offers.

“Like what?” he snaps— quiet for the baby’s sake, but sharp nonetheless.

“Like…”

“Like settling down at the fringes of the galaxy? Filling a whole house with weeds and useless knick knacks? Shacking up with a, a lover who wanted me dead not ten years back, and lazing about with a child and letting down my guard, like a whole galaxy doesn’t want me dead?”

He begins so sharp, yet it crumbles sentence by sentence to well-worn yearning. In his arms, the baby lets out a long coo.

Behind him, the door’s locking panel beeps.

“Rey’s—”

“At your back gate, I know.” Hux steps forward, returning Ben’s daughter to him. “I’ll go.”

“What about Moff Keboa—”

“Technically, I don’t need you for that,” he mutters. “It’s all right, I have other contacts to exhaust, I don’t need to be here, with...”

He steals one last look at Ben and flees.

.

Ben closes his eyes. He hears the rhythmic drizzle pattering against his window’s transparisteel. He senses Rey and their daughter upstairs, a pure gleaming white, and Hux’s presence somewhere nearby, a soft red smoldering in a world of grey. Still, there’s an unease, like the taut silence after lightning before the thunder crashes down—

_BOOM._

Outside, smoke curls up from an unexplained explosion. Ben summons a saber and a blaster just in case and runs, dressed only in grey clothes without a shred of armor. He runs towards a dark figure— masked, a swirling storm of black— locked just outside the back gate.

Locked in a firefight with an IG assassin droid twice his size, its limbs windmilling, every arm attached to a different weapon. Hux dances between shots, cloak deflecting the bolts, and he returns fire with a handheld ion cannon, freezing the droid with pulses of blue electricity.

One metal arm whips out and slashes Hux’s mask in two, exposing a sliver of pale skin, and rage fires through Ben’s head. With a clench of one fist, he crushes the droid’s chest. With the other fist, he yanks off the head.

He and Hux both pause.

“There’s a bounty on Rey,” Hux announces, voice filtered through gravel like Kylo Ren’s was. “I took the job and picked off my competitors. Obviously—”

The mass of metal joints shudders, sparks flashing from its death throes. With a metallic groan of metal, one arm twitches and throws one final blow.

A dart. It flies through the gash in Hux’s mask, burying itself between his eyes. Ben feels the toxin even before Hux stumbles back, a black stain in the Force sucking his red light.

It’s elegant, the way he falls.

Ben runs. No, no, he stumbles down the path and out the gate, quarters the droid with his saber just in case, then falls to his knees beside Hux. With trembling fingers he unlocks the latch of the mask, pulling out the dart with a flick of the Force. Already the stain has spread down under his eyes, further deepening the shadows of sleep deprivation. It creeps into the hollows of his cheek, already drawn too tight as if underfed.

Hux’s eyes are still wide open and focused on Ben, bright with pain.

“Hux—”

“I am not dying in a bacta tank,” he spits, gasping for breath. “Do you hear me, I am not—”

“You’re not dying.” 

Hux’s hands scrabble against his, and Ben takes them, intertwining bare fingers with slippery metal gauntlets, and he tries to pour the light of the Force back into him. The shadow spreads, and Hux’s head falls back, limp.

“I’m not letting you go,” Ben whispers as Hux’s eyes flutter closed. “Rey? Rey!”

.

Hux wakes in bed, stripped down to his undershirt and wrapped in blankets softer than anything he’d ever buy for himself. The bed too is too large— extravagantly spacious, at least thrice the size of his cot on the _Finalizer._ He blinks his eyes open and finds a bedroom, dark mahogany in contrast with golden tapestries and gauzy white curtains.

Rey sits by a window, curls falling loose to her shoulders. Dressed in pure white, she bends over an ancient-looking text, pages creaking when she turns them.

“I owe you my thanks,” Hux finally remarks.

She looks up at him.

“For my life,” he elaborates, “and his.”

With a thump she closes the book and puts it aside.

“Thank you,” she replies, “for looking into the bounty on my head.”

“Obviously I had no intent of collecting it; I was only eliminating threats.”

“Another gesture of goodwill?” she says, eyes twinkling.

He tips his head. “I do what I can.”

“Why did you turn?”

She catches him off-guard, and he narrows his eyes.

Rey adds, “I’ve asked about you. Finn Dameron says you were the last person he’d ever suspect of honest Resistance sympathies.”

“And why does Finn Dameron think I turned spy?” he drawls.

“Your undying hatred for Kylo Ren,” she replies, equally deadpan.

With a sigh, Hux drops his head— now free of black, revealing only his own stark features— into his hands.

“I turned due to idiotic naivete,” he answers at last. “The plan was that Ben would turn, and clever me, I’d be waiting for him on the other side.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” Hux says sharply, lifting his head to stare her down. “I don’t believe in dwelling on daydreams, and certainly not when they can’t possibly happen.”

“Why can’t they happen?”

He stares at her.

“I mean it. Why can’t they happen?”

He stares.

A frown flickers across her brow. “Ben told me about that day, on Crait. Are things...unsalvageable between you two? So you can’t want him anymore—”

“I will always want him.” 

The words tear out of him, entirely without permission.

“Hux.” She bends forward with elbows on her knees, beseeching. “Do not hold back from Ben on _my_ account.”

He studies her.

“So,” he ventures, “has your marriage just been an arrangement for convenience—”

“Ben and I are in love,” she interrupts sternly. “Soulmates in the Force.”

Hux freezes as he works out the implications.

“Are you—”

“If it’s not an easy decision, you can take time to think about it.”

He scoffs in disbelief. “Does _Ben_ know what you’re saying?”

Rey furrows up her brow, genuinely puzzled. “He’s asleep in the guest room right now, Force healing takes considerable energy—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Ben will understand.”

Hux presses his mouth against one fist, and his gaze wanders to the window. Outside Arkanis rings with storms, winds and rain wrapping the whole house tight.

“We came here,” she offers, “because you used to dream about when you lived in a house like this one, and he dreams of you.”

He breathes in sharply, nose flaring.

“I don’t know how well-acquainted you are with local custom,” he finally says with a voice like ice. “But on Arkanis, marriage is sacrosanct. If you’re married, you don’t stray. And for someone unwed, there is no greater sin than breaking someone else’s marriage.”

“I don’t know how well you know Jakku,” comes her rejoinder. “But there we take what we can get. Every drop of water, every piece of scrap metal, every sliver of love. If I can help it, I never leave someone to starve.”

His storm-grey eyes glaze over.

“What Ben and I have?” she says, rising with the book under her arm. “It’s magic. Palpatine couldn’t break it, you couldn’t even if you tried. And there’s no stopping Ben from wanting you. Believe me, he’s tried.”

“He doesn’t—”

“Every second when he was alive and he thought you weren’t,” Rey breaks in, earnest and low, “when I brought him back to life, while we walked down the wedding aisle together, he was mourning you.”

She turns and leaves him to his tears.

.

When Rey and Ben wake in their guest room the next morning, the main bedroom is empty.

.

Ben opens his eyes when the midday sun hits him, slipping in the silver space between clouds. Ordinarily his daughter’s fussing would have woken him and Rey by now, keenly attuned as they are to those ripples in the Force. He rises, pulling a grey sweater on as he goes, and he creeps through the upstairs hall, loath to disturb the house’s serene silence.

Then comes a coo, and Ben pushes open the nursery door, quiet as he can.

His daughter— Hope, with Ben’s unruly black curls and, thank the Force, Rey’s ears and nose— stands in her crib. She teeters, tiny hands gripping the railing. 

“Yes, I quite agree.”

Hux kneels on the floor before her, watching her intently, as focused as he ever was in a First Order tactical meeting. Grey eyes are locked on brown.

Hope lets loose another stream of babbling, and Hux nods with perfect gravity.

“I’ll have to draft a memorandum on the subject.”

“Aaah?”

“Of course, immediately.”

They continue their conversation, as she chatters incoherently and Hux responds with impeccable seriousness. He has his back towards the door, but still Ben can imagine his expressions— overwrought, borrowed from the height of General Hux’s pretentiousness. He over-enunciates in the most theatrical fashion, and his voice swoops wildly, and Hope hangs on his words, utterly _fascinated._

“What have you there?” Hux says when she picks up a ball. “A spherical device to improve coordination. An excellent choice, very popular in the _Finalizer’s_ training rooms.”

“Ba!”

“Commonly called a ‘ball,’ precisely! Now, what fate do you intend for it?”

“Mmmmmm-muh.”

“A plan to rival anything your father ever constructed.”

She lifts up the ball and then spikes it hard over the edge of the crib. It lands next to Hux with a gentle _thump._

“A collision! It’s always challenging to lose an asset,” he observes, looking at the ball and then back up at her. “Do you require my assistance in retrieval, or do you have a strategy of your own?”

She sticks out a hand. Instantly the ball zooms up to meet it, and Hux gasps loud.

“Tactical genius,” he crows, and Hope squeals back in delight.

She plops down to play with the ball, and Hux rises to his feet before he announces, “I can hear your snuffling.”

Ben rapidly wipes his cheeks dry. He tries to wipe off his silly smile, but it sticks in place. 

“Rey didn’t scare you off.”

Hux turns to face Ben. His hair is its original red with scattered grey, his cheeks clean-shaven with a slight healthful glow Ben’s never seen there before. “Were you hoping she had?”

“Hux—” he steps forward, plaintive and pleading— “I won’t make you do a thing you don’t want. If all you want is to pump me for intelligence, or come in to tell Hope ‘hello’ and not say a word to us, then I’ll live with it.”

“Can it work?” Hux tilts his head, not quite a challenge. “What Rey proposed?”

Ben inhales deep.

“Yes. Finn’s married to Poe Dameron, but he’s also seeing Rose Tico from the Resistance...and Rey.” Hux’s eyebrows shoot up, and Ben chuckles. “It’s delicate, we probably couldn’t get through a meal together without blasterfire.”

“What if what I’d want to do—” Hux steps forward, too close and sparks are pulsing all along Ben’s skin— “is to kiss you senseless?”

“To shut me up for once?”

“To make you mine.” He lifts one bare hand to cup Ben’s wet cheek. “Hers and mine.” His thumb brushes Ben’s considerable nose, and Hux’s lips quirk. “I kept coming back to Arkanis, even before I found you.”

Ben lifts his own hand to take Hux’s, interweaving their fingers. Their foreheads come to rest together.

“What if I don’t leave—”

Ben surges forward and kisses him in reply, their eyes closing, their heartbeats fluttering fast as butterfly wings. He reaches to Hux in the Force and finds light. It’s like the glow of sunrise, refracted and rippling outward on the Arkanis sea.

As he pulls away he feels Rey, leaning in the doorway.

“So, Hux,” she says mildly. Her expression is neutral enough, but Ben notices the golden triumph threaded through all her thoughts.

To his credit, Hux keeps nearly all the smugness off his own face. “Rey.”

She looks to Ben, then back to him, and smiles. “Would you like to stay for lunch?”

**Author's Note:**

> Reylo and Finnpoe are married. By the end of the story, Finnrey, Finnrose, and Kylux are also dating.


End file.
